railways.

[Illustration:

TE WAHAROA HENARE KAIHAU, M.H.R. HON. JAMES CARROLL, M.H.R
RIGHT HON. R.J. SEDDON (_Premier_) MAHUTA (_The Maori "King"_)

Photo by_ BEATTIE & SANDERSON, Auckland.]

From what has gone before, readers will readily understand that the
New Zealand Government has usually in its employ several thousand
labourers engaged in road-making, bridge-building, draining, and in
erecting and repairing public buildings. To avoid the faults of both
the ordinary contract and the day-wage system, a plan, clumsily called
The Co-operative Contract System, has been adopted by the present
Premier, Mr. Seddon. The work is cut up into small sections, the
workmen group themselves in little parties of from four to eight men,
and each party is offered a section at a fair price estimated by the
Government's engineers. Material, when wanted, is furnished by the
Government, and the tax-payer thus escapes the frauds and adulteration
of old contract days. The result of the system in practice is that
where workmen are of, at any rate, average industry and capacity, they
make good, sometimes excellent, wages. In effect they are groups of
piece-workers, whose relation with each other is that of partners.
Each band elects a trustee, with whom the Government officials deal.
They are to a large extent their own masters, and work without being
driven by the contractor's foreman. They are not encouraged to work
more than eight hours a day; but as what they get depends on what they
do, they do not dawdle during those hours, and if one man in a group
should prove a loafer, his comrades, who have to suffer for his
laziness, soon get rid of him. The tendency is for first-class men
to join together, and for second-class men to similarly arrange
themselves. Sometimes, of course, the officers, in making estimates
of the price to be paid for work, make mistakes, and men will earn
extravagantly high wages, or get very poor returns. But as the
sections are small, this does not last for long, and the balance is
redressed. After some years' experience, it seems fairly proved that
the average of earnings is not extravagant, and that the taxpayer
loses nothing by the arrangement as compared with the old contract
system, while the change is highly popular with workmen throughout the
Colony.

Those who know anything of politics anywhere, will not need to be told
that the changes and experiments here sketched have been viewed with
sus